REU Site: Undergraduate Research in Minority Group Demography

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The Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin has hosted a summer REU Site for the past 16 years. The organizing theme of the program is Minority Group Demography. Over the years, the site has introduced REU students to the research process through classroom study of demographic methods and mentored, independent research. A majority of the former REU students have gone on to graduate school. Notably, the program continues to be comprised of roughly 60% under-represented minority group students and about 70% female students. The intellectual merit of the REU Site involves the academic and ethical development of junior social science scholars around a topic of immense importance to the future of the United States. The program provides REU students with (1) exposure, (2) experience, and (3) expertise. Specifically, undergraduates are exposed to both the technical tools and professional culture of social science through social demography. REU students experience the rigorous course of study and intensity of the scientific research process firsthand. Finally, students demonstrate their expertise as junior members of the academy. The REU Site uses, as its organizing principle, the investigation of minority groups inU.S. society. Demography, with its focus on those population processes common to all groups--fertility, mortality, migration--provides powerful tools for investigating group differences in these processes, as well as group differences in such related conditions as wealth, poverty, family composition, education attainment, and labor force experience. In the United States, numerous groups are significantly underrepresented at the highest levels in the sciences. Given the composition of our students in this program, a scholarly concentration on minority group experience is relevant to both the students and the nation. The broader impact of the program is to influence the future of higher education in the social sciences, with special attention to the racial/ethnic and gender diversity of the future academic workforce. The successes of this REU program are already evident, including students who have recently earned their Ph.D.s and have been placed at leading research universities around the country, a host of students who are in leading graduate programs around the country, and others who have recently completed the REU program and will soon be moving on to graduate school.